Goofy Late Night Post

I have this livejournal account, mostly so I could answer Daniel Saunder‘s posts. Daniel writes about severe depression and Judaism, two topics about which I have experience, and Doctor Who, about which I know very little. (I don’t even own a tv, though I’m sure my older son could show me how to watch it on the internet if I were really interested). Daniel had a great post last week about Rav Soloveitchik’s Halachik Man. It takes a while to read his posts. He recently posted a best of the Blog, in which he starts out by saying:

I think part of my problem with blogging is that I can not decide what my blog is for. I sometimes think of it as a place where I can be myself, where I can explore all of my various, unconnected interests, in which case it does not matter who reads it. However, I also think of it as a way of delivering a message of some kind, of exploring certain ideas that I want relate to people in one or other of the sub-cultural groups that I am in, so it becomes necessary to reach that particular audience, whether of Doctor Who fans or Orthodox Jews or some other group.

Except perhaps for the Doctor Who part, this paragraph is one many bloggers can relate to. Who are we talking to and why?

Last week someone stopped me and said: “I found your blog!”
Uh, oh, I think. What did I say? Is someone REAL finding my blog? Someone I’m going to meet on the street (actually, it was in the back of my kids’ school)? Turns out, she has a great blog herself, and here it is: elinka.livejournal.com. Oh, by the way, it helps if you know Russian. Sometimes she writes “Shavua Tov” in Russian (Shavua Tov means Have a Good Week. In Hebrew). You can always enjoy the cute pictures.

I took a look around Live Journal tonight, and my account said I have no friends. Don’t you love it when you sign up for something new, and it tells you that you have no friends?

Finally, it asked this question:

What talent do you have that you wish more people would recognize?

I don’t know the answer. Do you have an answer?
My son, middle son, the one who once commented on my blog as me, who is up too late playing computer games next to me, said I should have said “fishing.”

9 thoughts on “Goofy Late Night Post”

Thanks, Larry. I need to know what you look like; if I meet you on the street, you won’t be wearing a tag that says Larry Lennhoff, will you? Maybe the next time you visit my neighbor the fabulous cook have her call me to meet you officially.

On reason I have two blogs is to segregate the Jewish stuff from everything else. Livejournal give you the opportunity to post visible only to your friends or even only to subgroups of your friends – for example I have ‘Jewish friends’ group – when I post to that group only a subset of my friends see it, an no one else at all does.

I’m a overweight bearded guy with glasses and a kippah, so I doubt you’ll be able to pick me out in a random encounter. I often eat a Valerie’s for Shabbat lunch – bli neder I’ll try and mention the next time I am invited there. Worst case I’ll try to invite you and your family to my house for a meal after Pesach.

More precisely, the way things have evolved is that my more mainstream O type postings go on blogspot and the hippier and more non-O friendly type Jewish postings go on livejournal.

I once posted something on yeridot hadorot on an open post on live journal, and some non-Jewish friends expressed horror at the concept and it seemed to lower their respect for Judaism. That was when I decided to split things. Because there is an active O community on blogspot, I decided to put my O type blog there.

Will have to take a look at your livejournal posts. I only looked at your blogspot stuff.

Can you post the link to that yeridot hadorot post? Or email it to me, if you want. You got me curious.

Yes, I can understand that certain concepts one wants to discuss among people who get it. I’m still looking for someone who gets why I have a problem with the famous Iggeres HaRamban. See my first post on anger.